Brushing Up On Chicago Art

Manierre Dawson`s Works Head To N.y.

WASHINGTON — In appreciating the remarkable art of Chicago painter Manierre Dawson, there is a dimension involved that is not readily apparent to the eye: time.

Observed now-and 25 of Dawson`s paintings will go on view at New York`s Whitney Museum of American Art Friday- his abstract oils hardly seem extraordinary. Dawson`s grouped, shaded, studious patterns intrigue but do not astound.

But consider that most of them were painted between 1909 and 1914, a period when much more conventional art was cause for opprobrium and alarm. Even a generation later, the Modernist school, in which Dawson was a pioneering experimenter, was the subject of critical warfare in his home city.

A curious man, Dawson. Born in 1887, he trained as a civil engineer and worked for some of the noted architects of his day. Painting was a pursuit of his spare time.

In 1910 he journeyed to Europe, discovering the Cubist work of Cezanne and Picasso. Impressed and influenced by their explorations, he tried new forms of abstraction. His first sale, for 200 francs in Paris, was to famed expatriate author Gertrude Stein. (A portrait he did of her, based on an earlier work of Picasso`s that was hanging in her apartment, is among the works in the Whitney exhibit.)

But instead of settling into a painter`s world and life, Dawson returned to Chicago and resumed his architectual engineering work. He exhibited in the 1913-1914 Chicago venue of the controversial Armory show, but his painting remained a hobby.

He tried to correct that by moving to rural Michigan and taking up orchard farming in hopes that the long, idle winters would allow him to develop his art further. Instead, it diminished as more commercial concerns occupied his time. When he died in 1969, he was known mostly as an investor and landowner.

A retrospective of Dawson`s work was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1976-77. The Whitney show will close Sept. 11.

- From now through Aug. 9, New York`s Museum of Modern Art will have on exhibit the premiere American showing of ``Fauna, a Fantastic Bestiary,`` the highly imaginative creation of two Spanish artists, Joan Fontcuberta and Pere Formiguera.

A multimedia ``documentary,`` employing photographs, drawings, maps, texts and audio tape, it is a natural-history exhibit on the life and habitat of several creatures, all imaginary. The artists` point is that authenticity is not necessarily the same as reality.

``Descent in Limbo,`` a little known and profoundly theological masterpiece by the Italian Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna (1430-1506), is the centerpiece of a special exhibit on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through Sept. 25. On view with the painting are drawings and prints by Mantegna and others related to the central work, including Mantegna`s drawing ``Study for the Figure of Christ.``

The Metropolitan also has a wonderful working exhibit for schoolchildren, ``It All Begins with a Dot: Exploring Lines in 20th Century Art,`` which teaches the use of line in the works of such masterful modern painters as Joan Miro, Stuart Davis, Jackson Pollack and Saul Steinberg. It will close Dec. 31. - Chicago composer Dan Tucker, whose ``Overture to Many Moons`` was performed by Mistislav Rostopovich and the National Symphony Orchestra in 1986, had another of his works, ``American Variations,`` featured in the NSO`s 4th of July concert Monday.

The full-length work was cut to a five-minute middle passage,

``Differences,`` to accommodate the program`s tight television schedule, but the composer pronounced himself pleased nontheless.

``Who could not be satisfied?`` Tucker said. ``This man knows what he`s doing.`` Tucker said he discovered during the performance that he had written a note for E-flat on the tenor saxaphone that does not exist on the horn, ``so you may have noticed a slight pause there.``

- Also over the 4th of July holiday, the Washington area was host to the sixth annual ``Sisterfire`` feminist celebration. Held at an equestrian center in suburban Upper Marlboro, Md., this unusual event featured performances and appearances by Buffy Sainte-Marie, Holly Near, the rock-appella trio

``Storme: Lady of the Jewel Box,`` ``A Farewell to Charms`` (an antilipstick film), ``Women Loving`` and ``Run, Sister, Run.`` Independence Day or no, this was not exactly something to honor the Founding Fathers.

- The National Gallery of Art in Washington is showing an exhibit of lithographic art, which was invented in 1796 by Bavarian writer and painter Aloys Senefelder and came to full flower in France in the 1820s and 1830s. The collection, ``Drawings in Stone,`` includes Eugene Isabey`s luminist lithograph masterpiece, ``Eglise Saint-Jean, Thiers,`` a brooding sketch of a mountaintop church and abbey. The exhibit will close Sept. 4.

- Things Not to See (unless you`re really in the mood): New York`s Museum of Modern Art is showing John Coplans` ``A Body of Work,`` the body in question being his naked self. He posed before a blank white wall, viewing himself on a video monitor as he turned this way and that. When pleased with a pose, he had an assistant take a Polaroid negative, which Coplans then cropped and printed in the darkroom. Coplans` intent was to deal in an ``intimate and impersonal way with the issue of aging and the objective fact of his own body.`` The show will close Saturday.